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Assessing hardwood flows from resource to production through Material Flow Analysis

  • Many doubts accompany both the resource potential of hardwoods and their softwood substituting potential within its material utilisation. However, as the feedstock demand will rise with more and more wood-based biorefineries entering the market, wood supply security is an increasingly pressing topic. Currently, hardwood flow models are lacking, but are an essential basis for estimating future hardwood supply security. This study investigates the actual hardwood flows in Germany by applying a Material Flow Analysis (MFA). Visualising the results of the MFA for the reference year 2016. The MFA displays 4.44 +/- 0.12 million m³ (fob) recorded fellings in privately-owned forests, 8.60 +/- 0.15 million m³ (fob) recorded fellings in state forests, 9.31 +/- 0.52 million m³ (fob) as unrecorded harvest from forests (i.e. 37% of the total harvest) and 2.65 +/- 0.35 million m³ (fob) unrecorded fellings from non-forest area (11% of total harvest). Of that, almost 30% were used for materials and 70% were used for energy. Consequently, the potential for material use of hardwood in Germany lies beyond its current usage, especially given that good qualities are being used for energy due to actual low material consumer demand. Thus, the MFA assessed the quality and quantity of the German hardwood potential and showed that it offers significant possibilities for value added usage options such as, for example, producing innovative products in biorefineries using degraded high-quality assortments. Due to the low data consistency, heterogeneous datasets for the forest and wood industry sector were calibrated through data reconciliation and error propagation. Additionally, the lack of statistical data for specific wood industry sectors raised a problem, for instance, actual data on private combustion of wood, established hardwood uses, or new innovative products. Severe data issues regarding the German hardwood flow were confirmed.

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Metadaten
Author:Veronika AuerORCiD, Peter Rauch
ISSN:2631-004X
Parent Title (English):9th Hardwood Proceedings - Part I
Document Type:Conference Proceeding
Language:English
Publication Year:2020
Tag:Material Flow Analysis; Sankey-diagram; hardwood; hardwood resource; hardwood resource assessment; wood resource potential; wood-based bioeconomy
First Page:13
Last Page:20
faculties / departments:Zentrum für Forschung, Entwicklung und Transfer